Professor Layton Tops Japanese Charts

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Series goes out with a bang.

By John Tanaka

The third game in Level 5's Professor Layton DS trilogy arrived in Japan last week and proved even more successful than its predecessors. Media Create reports that over the week of 11/24 to 11/30, Professor Layton and the Final Time Journey (this is not an official English name) was the top selling title in Japan with 347,360 units. The first and second entries in the series debuted at, respectively, 137,000 and 294,000 units.

There was a mix of new and old in this week's chart. Coming in at second was Winning Eleven 2009 on the PS3, with a debut at 168,405 units. Animal Crossing (Nintendo, Wii) and Chrono Trigger (Square Enix, DS), respectively first and second in last week's chart, followed with respective sales of 108,547 units and 80,157 units. Below them was another newbie, Yugioh Duel Monsters GX Tag Force 3 (Konami, PSP) which debuted with 64,179 units.

The rest of the top ten had Gundam VS Gundam (Bandai Namco, PSP) at 6th with 56,557 units, Kirby: Ultra Super Deluxe (Nintendo, DS) in 7th with 56,176 units, Kenka Bancho 3 (Spike, PSP) in 8th with 53,966 units, Musou Orochi Maou Sairin (Koei, PSP) in 9th with 45,809 units, and Higurashi Daybreak Portable (Alchemist, PSP) in 10th with 32,639 units. The latter three were new for the week.

Hardware positioning didn't change much this week. DSi was once again in top at 87,185 units, with PSP down at 55,090 units. Wii continued to keep the momentum from Animal Crossing, with 49,848 units sold this week.

The real news was the PS3, though. The system saw a jump to 34,978 units following a post price-drop slump. The release of Winning Eleven, which shipped alongside a limited edition hardware bundld, was the likely factor.

In contrast, the 360, which had its own version of Winning Eleven 2009 launch this week, saw a drop in hardware sales to 11,423 units. Compared to the 168,000 copies for the PS3 version of Winning Eleven, the 360 version didn't even reach the 10,000 mark.